Billionaire Bill Ackman called members of the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing Board, to step down following the departure of its former president, Claudine Gay, over plagiarism accusations and the anti-Semitism on campus congressional hearing.
Mr. Ackman criticized Harvard’s leadership for failing to address problems around its former president that have caused damage to the reputation of one of the world’s top universities.
“The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” Mr. Ackman said.
“Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board,” he added.
The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management has been a vocal critic of Ms. Gay as he opposed the way she handled the anti-Semitism issues at the Harvard campus since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. He has repeatedly called for her resignation following her controversial congressional hearing over the issue.
In his post, Mr. Ackman said the Board picked “the wrong president.” He condemned the Board for doing inadequate due diligence regarding Ms. Gay’s academic record even though she started a leadership position as dean of the Social Studies department in 2015.
In addition, he accused the Board of defending Ms. Gay’s plagiarism accusations, such as allegedly threatening the New York Post not to publish her plagiarism story, failing to identify many cases of her plagiarism, and characterizing plagiarism as “unintentional” or “duplicative language.” All of which, as Mr. Ackman noted, has caused greater reputational damage to the university.
He then spoke out against the Board for “unanimously” supporting Ms. Gay, given the many problems mentioned, which further damaged the university and the Board itself.
The Root of the Problem: DEI
In his long post, Mr. Ackman pointed out that “the root cause” of these problems is the diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI movement “that had been promulgated on campus.”“The E for ”equity“ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity,” he said, highlighting that DEI is “inconsistent with basic American values,” which are rooted in “a democracy with equality of opportunity for all.”
Mr. Ackman said that “DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
“Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed,” Mr. Ackman continued. “Under this ideology … one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being ‘not racist.’”
“Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its [sic] disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist,” he added.
He continued: “As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.”
Mr. Ackman called the DEI movement itself racist. “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism,” he said. “While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.”
“An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less,” Mr. Ackman said. “A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.”
Mr. Ackman then recommended Harvard shut down its DEI office, “broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, and ”The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI.”
“It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves,” he said.
